Precision landing can enhance exploration of the solar system and enable rockets that can be refueled and reused. Autonomous Precision Landing of Space Rockets Lars Blackmore Landing an autonomous spacecraft or rocket is very challenging, and land- ing one with precision close to a prescribed target even more so. Precision landing has the potential to improve exploration of the solar system and to enable rockets that can be refueled and reused like an airplane. This paper reviews the challenges of precision landing, recent advances that have enabled precision landing on Earth for commercial reusable rock- Lars Blackmore is principal ets, and what is required to extend this to landing on planets such as Mars. rocket landing engineer at SpaceX. Brief History of Autonomous Space Landings In the past 50 years autonomous spacecraft have brought humans back from space, landed several rovers on the surface of Mars (Bonfiglio et al. 2011; Golombek et al. 1997; Soffen and Snyder 1976; Squyres 2005; Way et al. 2006), got a probe onto Saturn’s moon Titan (Tomasko et al. 2002), landed on an asteroid (Bibring et al. 2007), and more. Because of these missions, it is now known that Mars was once warm with plenty of water and could likely have supported life, and that Titan has lakes of methane, an organic compound. Steady progress has enabled heavier payloads to be landed in more exotic locations, and recent improvements, such as advanced decelera- tor technologies (Tibbits and Ivanov 2015), will further expand explorers’ reach in the solar system. The 16 BRIDGE Challenges There are some important challenges to precision land- ing on a planet. Extreme Environment A vehicle entering an atmosphere from space goes through extreme conditions. • The majority of the entry energy is dissipated through friction with the atmosphere, resulting in extreme heating that must be dissipated; for example, the leading edge of the Apollo heatshield reached over 2500 degrees Celsius (Launius and Jenkins 2012). • Drag causes enormous forces on the reentry vehicle; for example, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Reusable (F9R) weighs about 35 metric tons and has a peak decelera- tion of six times Earth gravity on reentry. • Winds push around the reentry vehicle, with high- FIGURE 1 Landing ellipses for successful Mars landings to altitude winds at Earth regularly exceeding 100 miles date, shown on elevation map of Gale Crater. Highlighted in per hour. red is Curiosity’s landing target, known as Aeolis Palus. Image • Communication may be denied for all or part of reen- credit: Ryan Anderson, USGS Astrogeology Science Center. try as ionized air around the spacecraft interferes with Although these missions have aimed for a particular radio communications; for example, the Apollo 13 location on the surface of a target planet, the precision return capsule endured a 6-minute blackout. has varied. Precision is quantified using a landing ellipse, • And finally, a spacecraft operating outside of Earth the region where it is 99 percent likely that the vehicle orbit is subject to high radiation, which can be fatal will land. Before flight, mission planners must choose a for electronics. This is especially true of missions landing site such that everywhere in the landing ellipse operating near Jupiter, where the radiation environ- is safe for touchdown. Figure 1 shows that the landing ment is particularly intense. ellipse for Mars missions has steadily improved, but is still measured in kilometers rather than meters. Small Margin for Error The Need for Precision With most landings, the first attempt must be a success or the vehicle will be destroyed on impact. Moreover, addi- When precision is measured in kilometers, missions must tional propellant is rarely available for a second landing land in a desert (in the case of Mars) or in the ocean or attempt. For large rocket engines, throttling down to a on plains (in the case of Earth). If landing precision could hover is technically challenging and inefficient—every be measured in meters instead of kilometers, a world of second spent hovering is wasted propellant. new opportunities would open up: it would be possible to For F9R, the rocket has to hit zero velocity at exactly • explore Martian caves and valleys, zero altitude. If it reaches zero velocity too low, it will crash; if it reaches zero too high, it will start going back • return samples from other planets, up, at which point cutting the engines and falling is the • set up permanent outposts throughout the solar sys- only option. This requires precise knowledge and con- tem, and trol of vertical position and velocity. • make rockets that, after putting a payload into orbit, Touchdown Challenges can be refueled and reused like an airplane, instead of A dedicated system, such as landing legs, is usually being thrown away after a single flight, thus dramati- used to attenuate the loads of landing, keep the rocket cally decreasing the cost of space travel. safe from rocks, and prevent it from tipping over after WINTER 2016 17 landing. Being able to design legs that can do this as mass- and space- efficiently as possible is a challenge, as is delivering the rocket to the upright and stationary position required to avoid overload- ing the legs’ capabilities. For the Curiosity rover, the FIGURE 2 Left: SpaceX’s Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral. Right: The SpaceX autonomous SkyCrane system enabled spaceport drone ship. the dual use of the rover suspension as the land- ing attenuation system (Prakash et al. 2008). In addition, the land- ing environment may be hazardous. For the Mars Exploration rovers, the combination of rocks and high winds threatened to burst the landing airbags, FIGURE 3 SpaceX F9R approaching the drone ship for landing. so an autonomous vision and rocket system was added to detect and reduce lat- (ASDS), shown in figure 2. Images from recent SpaceX eral velocity (Johnson et al. 2007). landings are shown in figure 3. Central to achieving precision landing is the ability Need to Hit the Target to control dispersions, which are variations in the tra- Achieving precision landing requires the vehicle to jectory caused by environmental uncertainty. To illus- hit the target despite being pushed around by distur- trate this, consider the example of Falcon 9’s first stage bances such as winds. For a space reentry vehicle, this returning from space. To achieve precision landing, dis- is a unique problem, since it is neither a ballistic missile persions must be controlled so that, at touchdown, at nor an airplane. A ballistic missile tries to hit its target least 99 percent of them fit within the designated land- at high speed, so (like a bullet) it uses a high ballistic ing zone. For F9R, this means achieving dispersions in coefficient and high velocity to avoid being affected by the landing location of 10 meters or better for a drone disturbances. An airplane does get pushed around by ship touchdown and 30 meters or better for a landing at disturbances, but its wings give it the control author- Cape Canaveral. ity to correct for those disturbances with ease. A rocket Figure 4 shows the various phases of F9R’s mission. landing vertically has neither of these advantages, mak- On ascent, winds push the rocket around so that disper- ing precision landing highly challenging. sions grow. The first opportunity to shrink dispersions is the boostback burn, which sends the rocket shoot- Recent Advances ing back toward the launch pad. During atmospheric In the past two years, two commercial companies, entry, winds and atmospheric uncertainties again act to SpaceX and Blue Origin, have sent rockets into space increase dispersions. The landing burn is the last oppor- and landed them back on Earth within meters of their tunity to reduce the dispersions, and requires the ability targets. Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket has landed to divert, or move sideways. several times at the company’s West Texas test site. For F9R, controlling dispersions requires precision SpaceX’s Falcon 9 first stage has landed both on land boostback burn targeting, endoatmospheric control with at Cape Canaveral and on a floating landing plat- fins (shown in figure 5), and a landing burn with a divert form known as the autonomous spaceport drone ship maneuver. The latter is one of the most challenging The 18 BRIDGE (Açikmes¸e and Ploen 2007; Blackmore et al. 2010). Because Earth’s atmo- sphere is 100 times as dense as that of Mars, aerodynam- ic forces become the pri- mary concern rather than a disturbance so small that it can be neglected in the trajectory planning phase. As a result, Earth landing is a very different problem, but SpaceX and Blue Ori- gin have shown that this too can be solved. SpaceX uses CVXGEN (Mattingley and Boyd 2012) to gener- ate customized flight code, which enables very high- FIGURE 4 Phases of an F9R return-to-launch-site mission. The colored lines represent the largest possible variations in the trajectory, known as dispersions. speed onboard convex opti- mization. Next Steps Although high-precision landings from space have happened on Earth, chal- lenges stand in the way of transferring this technology to landing on other bodies in the solar system. One problem is navi- FIGURE 5 F9R’s grid fins, stowed for launch (left) and deployed for entry (right). gation: precision landing aspects, and is also required for proposed precision land- requires that the rocket know precisely where it is ings on Mars (Wolf et al. 2011). The vehicle must com- and how fast it’s moving. While GPS is a great asset pute a divert trajectory from its current location to the for Earth landing, everywhere else in the universe is a target, ending at rest and in a good orientation for land- GPS-denied environment.